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I went today to fetch more sacks of wooden pellets for the stove. We’re stocked up now for a fortnight or so. These are actually the pellets which we bought in advance of last winter and never used because we were away. (More about that in a future post.)

The dogs lost no time in occupying their usual positions – Taylor on his mat and Galileo on a green blanket on the pool steps. For anyone who remembers our dogs: note there is no Joules. He contracted very aggressive prostate cancer (despite being neutered) in April of this year and had to be put to sleep – by chance on his birthday. He was exactly ten years old.

I was given some ‘pearls’ (gelatin capsules) of Omega 3 with vitamin E to give him – 3 a day for the foreseeable future. I won’t be able to resist jokes about swine and wisdom.

We returned home to a real mess. Kepler had somehow managed to get a book off the bookshelf and had shredded most of it with great thoroughness all over the floor. (It was a dictionary, giving new meaning to the phrase ‘swallowing a dictionary’.)

He was extremely hyperactive for about an hour, then just collapsed on his blanket under my desk and went fast asleep.

Joules of course was delighted to be back, and so are we delighted that his future looks as rosy as anyone’s can be.

We’ve just made a third fruitless journey from Valtopina to Terni (two and a half hours round trip) hoping and expecting our dog Joules to be given his fourth chemotherapy injection. It would have meant he was half way through the cancer treatment and I could believe it might someday end.

But no, his white blood cell count was so low that the line on the graph scarcely lifted its head off the x-axis. Back to the drawing board.

The drawing board involves giving him a twice-daily dose of three-quarters of an antibiotic pill. I ask you. Dividing it in half is fine; the pill was designed for that. But splitting it again … A knife makes no headway at all because there’s a smooth coating on the pill; pliers crush one of the quarters. The best solution so far is pincers.

A happy Joules in his Elizabethan collar

But the worst of it is that there are 2 pieces to give the dog. Inserting 2 pieces into a moving target (the dog’s open mouth) risks one of the pieces dropping to the edge of the tongue from where it can be spat out. The best thing is to do it in 2 goes – but that means he’s forewarned and forearmed for the second go!